When Muslims destroy the Quran

I would oppose the hate-mongering destruction of the Quran (or Koran) by Terry Jones even if it didn’t provoke some Muslims to violence and many others to outrage and resentment. But some groups of Muslims have intentionally destroyed mosques and thus Qurans, apparently without receiving such near-universal condemnation.

Mosques not only contain books of the Quran; holy verses often adorn their walls. So, to bomb or burn a mosque is to bomb or burn the Quran.

Yet Sunni Muslim mobs have attacked and burned Ahmadiyya Muslim mosques in Indonesia recently. An Ahmadi man was arrested for stabbing, he says, an armed attacker in order to protect the mosque and its Qurans. It’s the same Quran as other Muslims use. And the Ahmadiyya mosques apparently are equivalent to Sunni mosques: a local government in Indonesia has ejected the Ahmadis from one and opened it to other Muslim worshipers. In the voluminous news reports about these incidents, I have yet to see even opponents of the attacks (and there are many) lament the destruction of the Quran – much less in the terms used against Jones’ reprehensible acts.

The same goes for bombings of mosques by rival groups of Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran. Plenty of people are angry or saddened, but where is the extraordinary concern for the Quran per se? And how can these groups attack mosques in the name of Islam? The attention paid to destroying the Quran seems selective.